Monday, September 05, 2005

Tyg Jarrico's Burning Life

Tyg Jarrico's Burning Life (Burning Life 2 66,99) is one of many hallucinatory trips through the prosaic and sublime aspects of our existence to be experienced on the Burning Life Sims for 2005, however it is the overall presentation and packaging of this particular build that warrants mention here.

The entry sequence through a small water garden seems a bit superfluous once one begins the ascent into a mysterious matrix of luminous, translucent coloured orbs that really starts the futile process of trying to get one's mind around this structure. Each orb from the exterior features an animated cloud texture that heightens a sense of departure from the desert floor.

Movement through the structure is a strictly linear sequence which occasionally pops out into the interstitial space between the orbs, each of which belies its transparent exterior as a container for a thematic moment, spelunking a cave, pining away in an apartment, traversing the backs of butterflies, navigating a starfield, cloistered in the cabin of a commercial airliner...hopefully you're starting to get my drift. The only conceptually inconsistent area in the build is the 'Art Museum' but this is more than made up for by the dramatic climax, starkly alone, in the blackness of space, staring back at the planet earth.

The trans-dimensional aspect of this build is reminiscent to me of the slitscan sequence at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (sans giant floating fetus, although it wouldn't have been out of place), as one is bombarded with flashes of possible alternative realities, with the orbs acting as architectural skeleton. The monolith is dead. Long live the monolith.

Aye, Tyg's Burning Life exhibit is an incredible creation and we certainly don't want to see it go poof on the 19th. So we're very grateful to Tyg for letting us give his exhibit a permanent home in Chatelaine in the Thunberg sim, so that it can be enjoyed and experienced by current and future residents of SL.